Mrs. Dressel's face softened at the note of weariness in the girl's voice. "Are you very tired, dear?" she asked drawing her down to a seat on the sofa.
"Yes, and no—not so much bodily, perhaps, as in spirit." Justine Brent drew her brows together, and stared moodily at the thin brown hands interwoven between Mrs. Dressel's plump fingers. Seated thus, with hollowed shoulders and brooding head, she might have figured a young sibyl bowed above some mystery of fate; but the next moment her face, inclining toward her friend's, cast off its shadows and resumed the look of a plaintive child.
"The worst of it is that I don't look forward with any interest to taking up the old drudgery again. Of course that loss of interest may be merely physical—I should call it so in a nervous patient, no doubt. But in myself it seems different—it seems to go to the roots of the world. You know it was always the imaginative side of my work that helped me over the ugly details—the pity and beauty that disinfected the physical horror; but now that feeling is lost, and only the mortal disgust remains. Oh, Effie, I don't want to be a ministering angel any more—I want to be uncertain, coy and hard to please. I want something dazzling and unaccountable to happen to me—something new and unlived and indescribable!"
She snatched herself with a laugh from the bewildered Effie, and flinging up her arms again, spun on a light heel across the polished floor.
"Well, then," murmured Mrs. Dressel with gentle obstinacy, "I can't see why in the world you won't go to the Gaines's garden-party!" And caught in the whirlwind of her friend's incomprehensible mirth, she still persisted, as she ducked her blonde head to it: "If you'll only let me lend you my dress with the Irish lace, you'll look smarter than anybody there...."
Before her toilet mirror, an hour later, Justine Brent seemed in a way to fulfill Mrs. Dressel's prediction. So mirror-like herself, she could no more help reflecting the happy effect of a bow or a feather than the subtler influence of word and look; and her face and figure were so new to the advantages of dress that, at four-and-twenty, she still produced the effect of a young girl in her first "good" frock. In Mrs. Dressel's festal raiment, which her dark tints subdued to a quiet elegance, she was like the golden core of a pale rose illuminating and scenting its petals.
Three years of solitary life, following on a youth of confidential intimacy with the mother she had lost, had produced in her the quaint habit of half-loud soliloquy. "Fine feathers, Justine!" she laughed back at her laughing image. "You look like a phoenix risen from your ashes. But slip back into your own plumage, and you'll be no more than a little brown bird without a song!"
The luxurious suggestions of her dress, and the way her warm youth became it, drew her back to memories of a childhood nestled in beauty and gentle ways, before her handsome prodigal father had died, and her mother's face had grown pinched in the long struggle with poverty. But those memories were after all less dear to Justine than the grey years following, when, growing up, she had helped to clear a space in the wilderness for their tiny hearth-fire, when her own efforts had fed the flame and roofed it in from the weather. A great heat, kindled at that hearth, had burned in her veins, making her devour her work, lighting and warming the long cold days, and reddening the horizon through dark passages of revolt and failure; and she felt all the more deeply the chill of reaction that set in with her mother's death.
She thought she had chosen her work as a nurse in a spirit of high disinterestedness; but in the first hours of her bereavement it seemed as though only the personal aim had sustained her. For a while, after this, her sick people became to her mere bundles of disintegrating matter, and she shrank from physical pain with a distaste the deeper because, mechanically, she could not help working on to relieve it. Gradually her sound nature passed out of this morbid phase, and she took up her task with deeper pity if less exalted ardour; glad to do her part in the vast impersonal labour of easing the world's misery, but longing with all the warm instincts of youth for a special load to lift, a single hand to clasp.